


thrilling wonder stories

by luninosity



Series: Pulp Fictions [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, First Kiss, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pulp Science Fiction, writer!Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-25
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-04-17 06:19:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4655883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm a writer," Bucky said.</p><p>(So this DID go up as part of the Collected Ficlets, a while ago, yes. Trust me: there's a reason it's here now. That reason involves the sequel...)</p>
            </blockquote>





	thrilling wonder stories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melonbutterfly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melonbutterfly/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [thrilling wonder stories](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4779788) by [ogawaryoko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ogawaryoko/pseuds/ogawaryoko)
  * Inspired by [Collected Ficlets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/695368) by [luninosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity). 



> So this DID go up as part of the Collected Ficlets, a while ago, yes. 
> 
> But then I really wanted to write the sequel/expansion/bits of Bucky's stories and Steve's reactions. And then that sequel grew to at least five chapters, and could not be contained in a little ficlet. And then melonbutterfly ([flylittlekoala on tumblr](http://flylittlekoala.tumblr.com/)) also wanted to play in this AU (look for that story, too!). And I thought, well--why not let _other_ people come and play too? 
> 
> So, this is my invitation: once I get *this* story up, and the sequel/expansion/whatever that is, and my co-author has hers up--then if you want to--obviously don't contradict anything melonbutterfly and I might've established as 'canon,' or maybe check in with me if you've got an idea; but if you want to have some fun writing Bucky's pulp-fiction stories, or Steve and Bucky acting out some scenes from stories, or anything else...go for it! :-)
> 
> Anyway, so here is the first one, reposted and with a TINY bit of editing, to set it all up...

_then_

“Bucky,” Steve said. He was unhappy and scared and determined; he was going to get the truth if it killed him, and oh he was afraid it might. The evening crept in, a low burning summer haze over Brooklyn rooftops; and Bucky’s answer might burn and sear and eat away at his heart, but he had to know. “Bucky, tell me.”

“Tell you what,” Bucky evaded, “we’re out of potatoes, okay, yeah, I know, I’ll go out tomorrow.” He had day’s-end sunlight in his dark hair and was hanging up his jacket, and Steve loved him silently, helplessly, unspoken and bronzed with habitual beloved pain.

The pain sharpened at that deflection. “You know it ain’t about the potatoes. I know I didn’t have my share of rent. Again. And you covered.” Indolent sunbeams, city-fed and summer-fat, spilled accusations through the window. Bucky paused where Steve’d ambushed him in the doorway, slowly kicked his shoes off, bit his lip. Tense shoulders. Wary eyes.

“Bucky,” Steve said. “Come on. You know you’re gonna tell me.”

“Haven’t yet,” Bucky said, almost pulling off light-hearted.

“You know you want to.” Bucky, he thought, talk to me. I don’t know what I’ll do if—please talk to me. Please let this, what you’re doing for us, for me, dammit, please let it not be fuckin’ true.

“Stubborn little punk, you are,” Bucky said. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

“You, five times a day.” Steve took a breath—his lungs ached, unhappy too—and said, “You were out every night last week and today I saw you—eating lunch with some guy—”

“I eat lunch,” Bucky scowled, “and what the hell were you doin’ there, that neighborhood—”

It’d been a nice neighborhood. Business types. Polished. Ties and jackets. Bucky’s lunch partner’d had shirtsleeves casually rolled up, coat thrown over the back of his chair, one hand reaching out to touch Bucky’s wrist: fingers over tanned skin and familiar knobs of bone.

“Advertising design commission. Big firm. He was wearin’ a suit and you didn’t look happy and you—” Steve stopped. Hauled his voice back to reasonable-person levels. Bucky wasn’t his. Bucky liked girls. Bucky had given him a home after his Ma’d passed, had given him a home and a shoulder to lean on even in the face of Steve’s prickly angry intransigence. Bucky had never left, even when Steve’d pushed him away. Bucky had made terrible cheap coffee and waited, and had put arms around him when Steve woke sobbing in the night. And Bucky, who was too unbearably beautifully _kind_ for some little loudmouth punk armed with sarcasm and a drawing-pencil, whom Steve loved with his entire loudmouth punk ferocious soul, could _never_ be his—

He finished, emptily, “You didn’t look happy. And. I gotta know.”

“Steve,” Bucky sighed. “Stevie.” He was avoiding Steve’s gaze. “Okay. Jesus, okay. It’s not what you think.”

“Then tell me.” Tell me why him. Not why this—God knew they needed the money, and that was Steve’s fault too, eating like acid into his gut. I know why, he thought. But why not me first, if you—why not me ever, my hands touching your shy wrists, my hands making you mine, the smile in your eyes when I say somethin’ stupid and bossy and sarcastic and I hold onto the idea that maybe you love it—

“ ’S embarrassing,” Bucky said. Without shoes, his feet wore only socks, oddly innocent on the faded wooden floorboards. The left sock had a hole starting around the toe.

“You’ve seen me literally naked and coughing up a lung,” Steve said.

Bucky watched the floor, the falling sunlight, the slow travel of sundown through the thick cloudy glass of the ancient window. “ …’m a writer.”

“You,” Steve said. “You what?”

“ _Amazing Stories. Thrilling Wonder Tales, Tales to Astonish_. Hell, _Detective Tales, Frontier Stories,_ and, uh, _Romance Tales_. For girls. As Rebecca Jane Buchanan.” Bucky made a go-ahead-and-laugh sort of face, scrubbed a hand through his hair. His ears got pinker. “He’s my publisher. Lunch. I’m late with a story. Romance story. Kinda stuck. Been goin’ up the street to Tommy’s diner, staring at coffee and blank pages, all week.”

“You’re a writer.”

“So now you know, so just—just shut up about it,” Bucky said.

“Like hell,” Steve said, “I live with an actual writer, an actual famous writer, why didn’t you say—”

“ ’S just pulps,” Bucky told the sunshine. “Y’know. Pulp fiction. Sensation stories. Dime-novel crap. I said shut up about it.”

“You know how many people _read_ the pulps?” Steve said. “You know how many people you’ve made smile?”

Bucky looked at him for the first time, then.

“Show me,” Steve said, asking, as close to begging as he could come. “I mean. If you. If you want.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Please.”

“Look at that,” Bucky said, “Stevie Rogers bein’ polite,” but embarrassed pride scampered through his voice, his eyes. “You really wanna read something I wrote?”

“I know you’re worth reading,” Steve said. Steve believed it. The sunset over his shoulder believed it too. So did Bucky’s publisher, apparently; so did the world, and Bucky’s audience awaiting the next story.

“Might have a few author copies,” Bucky ventured. “Lyin’ around.”

“Yeah? Go get ’em.”

“Huh,” Bucky mused, not moving, grinning at him, maybe even wistfully.

“What?”

“Nothin’. Just think I solved my story, is all.” Bucky moved to go—to find, presumably, aforementioned author copies—and Steve said, as the world changed, “You said it was a romance you were stuck on,” and Bucky said “Oh fuck me.”

“I might, um,” Steve said, “might’ve thought about that, once or twice,” and as Bucky’s mouth fell open Steve stepped closer and reached up and tangled a hand in his hair and dragged him down into a kiss.

Bucky started laughing—out of amazement, Steve thought, feeling pretty damn amazed and shell-shocked and in love himself—and kissed him right back, hot and clumsy and unpracticed and devout and fierce. The sunset wrote romance around them.

 

_later_

Later, much later, decades of winter and pain and anguish later, Bucky sat down noiselessly on the floor at Steve’s feet where Steve’d been reading on the sofa; Bucky these days moved like a skittish shadow and instinctively put himself lower than Steve in most casual spaces, kneeling or sitting at feet and gazing up; but that was something they were reclaiming together from those years of torture, gradually turning brainwashed obedience into simple loving deference. Bucky looked up, now; Steve, knowing from experience that this meant a request, put a hand on his head, stroked his hair. Bucky smiled, calm and unafraid, leaning into the touch, leaning into Steve’s leg.

“Okay,” Steve said, “what?”

“I don’t only do this when I want something,” Bucky said.

“I know,” Steve agreed. “But you’re about to ask.”

“I don’t think I can write thrilling action-adventure stories anymore,” Bucky said. “Maybe a—like a memoir. Autobiography. A romance. Can I have writing paper, Steve?”

Steve cried a little, and kissed him a lot, and bought profusions of paper: thick and creamy, heavy-duty and book-scented, bound in soft-textured buttery notebooks or crinkle-covered notebooks or slim sleek weatherproof notebooks; bought pens that whispered like obsidian silk over pages, and pens that wrote in stormy-sea ink the color of Bucky’s eyes. He read along, every word, as Bucky finally told his own story on a page.

**Author's Note:**

> Now with [gorgeous art by sakura9842 on tumblr over here!](http://sakura9842.tumblr.com/post/127705366839/for-luninosity-later-much-later-decades-of)


End file.
